György Kepes [Editor]: SIGN, IMAGE, SYMBOL. New York: George Braziller, 1965. First edition [part of the Vision and Value Series]. Quarto. Tan cloth stamped in black. 281 pp. 200 black and white images. Dust jacket and page design by Quentin Fiore. Dust jacket lightly worn, so a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
9.25 x 11 book with 281 pages with 200 black and white images on communication through signs, images, and symbols.Includes essays on both prehistoric and modern art, on handwriting, and on architecture and design. In the Vision and Value Series, Kepes carries on the pedagogical tradition of fusing art and science that his mentor Moholy-Nagy pioneered at the Bauhaus and in Chicago at the Institute of Design. These books carry the torch first lit by Moholy-Nagy and Gropius in their Bauhausbucher series.
Contributions by Rudolf Arnheim, Saul Bass, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, John Burchard, Edmund Carpenter, Henry Dreyfuss, Heinz von Foerster, Lawrence Frank, James Gibson, Sigfried Giedion, J. P. Hodin, Abraham Maslow, P. A. Michelis, Rudolf Modley, C. Morris and F. Sciadini, Robert Osborn, Ad Reinhardt, Paul Riesman, Ernesto Rogers and Werner Schmalenbach.
Contains work by Edward Durell Stone, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Paul Klee, Alexander Rodchenko, Paul Rand, Gyorgy Kepes, Jean Arp, Herbert Bayer and others.
György Kepes (1906 - 2001) was a friend and collaborator of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Also of Hungarian descent, Kepes worked with Moholy first in Berlin and then in London before emigrating to the US in 1937. He was educated at the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In his early career he gave up painting for filmmaking. This he felt was a better medium for artistically expressing his social beliefs. From 1930 to 1937 he worked off and on with Moholy-Nagy and through him, first in Berlin and then in London, met Walter Gropius and the science writer J. J. Crowther. In 1937, he was invited by Moholy to run the Color and Light Department at the New Bauhaus and later at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He taught there until 1943. In 1944 he wrote his landmark book LANGUAGE OF VISION. This text was influential in articulating the Bauhaus principles as well as the Gestalt theories. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1974 and in 1967 he established the Center for Advanced Studies. During his career he also designed for the Container Corporation of America and Fortune magazine as well as Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown.
“Quentin Fiore, who was born in New York in 1920, had been a student of George Grosz (like Paul Rand) at the Art Student's League and Hans Hoffman at the Hoffman School. His interest in classical drawing, paper making, and lettering attested to a respect for tradition. He began his career before World War II as a letterer for, among others, Lester Beall (for whom he designed many of the modern display letters used in his ads and brochures before modern typefaces became widely available in the U.S.), Condé Nast, Life , and other magazines (where he did hand-lettered headlines for editorial and advertising pages). Fiore abandoned lettering to become a generalist and for many years designed all the printed matter for the Ford Foundation in a decidedly modern but not rigidly ideological style. Since he was interested in the clear presentation of information, he was well suited as a design consultant to various university presses, and later to Bell Laboratories (for whom he designed the numbers on one of Henry Dreyfuss' rotary dials). In the late 1960s he also worked on Homefax, a very early telephone fax machine developed by RCA and NBC. It was never marketed, but Fiore coordinated an electronic newspaper that would appear on a screen and be reproduced via a sophisticated electrostatic copying process.
"Fiore's acute understanding of technology came from this and other experiences. In an article he wrote in 1971 on the future of the book, Fiore predicted the widespread use of computer-generated design, talking computers, and home fax and photocopy technologies. He also predicted the applications of the computer in primary school education long before its widespread use; accordingly, in 1968 he designed 200 computerlike "interactive" books for school children to help increase literacy skills.
"After these experiments, as before, Fiore continued to apply himself to a variety of assignments using appropriate methods. In 1985 he returned to drawing and letter design as the illustrator for the Franklin Library's version of Moby-Dick, but his '60s work is that bridge between the old and new, the beginning of the "end" of the classic book." — Steven Heller, adapted from an essay in Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design (Allworth Press, 1997).
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